Fraternal twins Drini and Vjosa Pellumbi have more in common than the same birthday. So far, their education and career paths have followed side by side. The brother and sister graduated from Bethel Regional High School with college credit gained through the ANSEP program, and are currently studying mechanical engineering at the University of Alaska Anchorage.
The Pellumbi twins are busy advancing a prototype of a device that attaches to home boilers and aims to reduce heating costs in cold-weather climates.
"Essentially, it takes heat that would have been wasted by the boiler and just repurposes it to heat incoming water," Drini said.
Their Arctic Heat Recovery System design earned the top prize and $21,000 at the Alaska Innovation Competition hosted by the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF). The same day, the pair celebrated their 20th birthday.
"It was such a whirlwind of emotions, because during the finals of that competition we still had finals for our semester course, and you know we're taking rigorous engineering courses, so stresses were high," Vjosa said. "It was just, it was a lot of good news that day."
This summer, the Pellumbis are both in Washington, D.C., interning with a wildlife conservation nonprofit. In their off-hours, they’re plugging away at their prototype.
"On my table right in front of me we have a couple thermocouples and sensors. We're in two separate apartments, but we take turns, whose room carries all the junk," Drini said.
Drini said that the heat recovery concept is nothing new, but that it’s so far been focused on large-scale commercial applications.
"I guess a lot of people just don't see a profit margin in developing it for Alaskan citizens, like residents, to use," Drini said. "We're not really in it for the profit, we're in it because it's clean, it saves oil, it saves money, it saves pollutants from entering the atmosphere. Hopefully it'll be good all around."
Friends and family in Bethel – where fuel prices have recently spiked due to the war in Iran – are eager to be the first to test the device. The Pellumbis said that it has the potential to save homeowners thousands of dollars per year.
The Pellumbis said that the money they earned at this year’s Arctic Innovation Competition is going directly into making the heat recovery system a reality.
The second-generation Albanian-Americans credit their mother for pushing them to apply together for the competition. Vjosa said that the parallel paths she and her brother have taken come down to family ties.
"Within Albanian culture, one of the core values is being very family-oriented. So I guess that's always been why we've gravitated towards doing the same things, because we’ve always been close," Vjosa said.
Both siblings said that they could end up specializing in different engineering fields down the road. But for now, they said that they’re enjoying being a team as long as they can.
Visit the UAF College of Business and Security Management YouTube channel to watch a video of 2026 Arctic Innovation Competition finalists.
